Not that long ago my younger brother was asked, “What’s your sister doing these days?” He replied, “She’s a museum curator.” The follow-up question was, “So, what does she do?” After a pause in which he choked on a fly that had flown into his mouth, he said, as if stating the obvious, “She . . . curates.” He relayed this conversation to me during a phone call and then had to ask, in all seriousness, “So what do you actually do as a curator?” My reply - “Herd cats,” (because this is my little brother, and little brothers don’t usually deserve serious answers).

Curator is a nifty umbrella term that comes from the Latin cura which means “to care.” This is why we have curators scattered all over museums, zoos, and art galleries. Wherever there is a large collection of items, there needs to be someone to take care of those things. This is a massive simplification of hundreds of jobs that require years of education and experience, but when you burrow down through the ponderous verbiage of bureaucratic job descriptions what you end up with is a lot of people who passionately care about obscure things and, for the most part, can’t wait to tell you about them.

Which is how we come to my job – Curator of Exhibits – because one of the more specific definitions of a curator is “one who selects and presents.” I am blessed, challenged, and frequently humbled by the task of selecting from tens of thousands of items from the collections of the State Historical Society and presenting them to the public through exhibits.

The first part of the selection process is to determine what type of story we want to tell. Is it specific, such as Guns of North Dakota?

Or is it broad and sweeping, like North Dakota: Yesterday and Today?

The latter is the title of newest permanent exhibit that will open at the Heritage Center on November 2, 2014.

For the last two and a half years I’ve been part of a team that has worked to distill the story of North Dakota, and then tell that story through words, photos, and objects. This is the next step – what pieces do we put on exhibit? There is only so much room in exhibit galleries, and culling the list of possible objects is a long process of compromise. A colleague described it as “trying to decide which of your kids you love most.” And we want to show our “children” in their best light, so we also work to make sure the objects are safely displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner that complements the larger story – that’s the “present” part.

We hope you’ll come join us November 2^nd to see our newest exhibits, and we hope that you care about them as much as we do!

If you could go into the archaeology collections storage, what would you find? Mostly a lot of boxes. If you could peek into those boxes, what would you see? Mostly a lot of bags! If you could look inside one of those bags, what would you see? You would finally find an object! Since it isn’t possible for everyone to visit all the collections (and even if you could, there would not be much that you could easily see), this is the perfect opportunity for an online collections tour! This week’s tour will take us through some of the collection from Fort Rice (32MO102), a state historic site in Morton County, North Dakota (http://history.nd.gov/historicsites/rice/index.html).

Why Fort Rice? Quite a few projects I have worked on recently have involved this site, so there happen to be a lot of fun photos available. Dr. Barbara Handy-Marchello recently gave a talk at the fall North Dakota Archaeological Association (NDAA) meeting about the lives of officers’ wives who lived at this fort, and she needed me to photograph specific objects for her presentation. In the meantime, I cataloged about 678 additional objects from the site.

The first Fort Rice was established in 1864 as part of a chain of military forts built to protect transportation routes in the region. In 1868 Fort Rice was expanded and used as a military post until it was finally abandoned in 1878. Most of the objects in our collection date to the time of the fort, though some of the objects are more recent. Others pre-date the presence of non-native peoples in the area.

What kinds of questions come to your mind when you look at these objects? I wonder what their stories would be if they could talk (or write their own blog)!

Dentalium shell beads, like these, come from the ocean. Who wore these beads?

(2010.99.7312)

(2010.99.7312)

These are stone end scrapers for preparing animal hides. What was made out of the hides that these helped prepare?

(2010.99.6885, .6881, and .6884)

There are a lot of beautiful glass beads from Fort Rice. Which color would you pick to wear and why?

(2010.99.7198)

I would pick the green beads. I like green!

(2010.99.7242)

Or maybe I would choose the blue glass beads–I also like blue!

(2010.99.7228)

Or there is a bead with spots! Maybe I will just have to do a future post all about beads.

(2010.99.7307)

This boot was made for walking! Who wore this boot and where did they walk in it?

(2010.99.7444)

A metal spur. Did the person who wore this like riding fast? What was the horse’s name?

(2010.99.3214)

A fragment of a ceramic plate or saucer. This would probably have been part of a fancy place setting. What dinner party conversations did it witness?

(2010.99.1206)

These are fragments of a doll’s tea set. Was this someone’s favorite toy?

(2010.99.6296 and .6295)

There are a lot of glass bottles in the Fort Rice collection. This is a close-up of a medicine bottle. The letters on the bottle read: USA HOSP DEPT. Who needed this medicine and why?

(2010.99.2213)

Metal handcuffs. These look rather unpleasant. I wonder who had to wear these and for how long?

(2010.99.6159)

Where should we go next on our archaeology collections tour? Please let me know what kinds of artifacts or collections you would like to see in my next post!

Visitors often have personal connections to the history of Fort Totten. Researching the files we have at the site and answering a visitor’s question is one of the most rewarding parts of being a Site Supervisor. There are three resources we primarily use. Two of them are primary sources, and the third is secondary.

The first source we use when looking for an answer to a question is one of the three school yearbooks donated to us by former students of the boarding school that operated here between 1891 and 1959. The yearbooks are from 1910, 1939, and 1951. These have great pictures of former students and employees of the school as well as the clubs and sports organizations the school had throughout its history. This past summer, the 1910 yearbook was used to locate photos of two girls who had once attended the school. The girls were ancestors of a woman visiting the site. She was looking for information to help her research her family history.

Cover of 1951 yearbook

Archival staff and past Site Supervisors have also compiled wonderful collections of historical photos. Several of these have been placed in a large binder, located at the site. The photos show many of Fort Totten’s buildings-- some of which no longer exist. They are a great reference when showing visitors what the Fort used to look like. I used this binder and the historic photos while putting together information to have a gazebo rebuilt two summers ago. The gazebo had been constructed early on in the school era to beautify the grounds.

Picture of new gazebo

I also use historic photos to promote the site’s history on our Facebook page It has been a great way to interact with the public and to spark conversations about the site. Stories that people share about the site and post on the Facebook page are gathered and put in our site’s history files after permission is granted from the author.

The secondary source that I reference the most while searching for answers to visitors’ questions is the book, History of Fort Totten, which was written in the 1950s by the United States Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The book details the history of Fort Totten, including the Indian Industrial School and Frontier Fort Era. It also has a chapter of oral histories that were gathered by the State Historical Society of North Dakota in the 1970s and 1980s from former students of the school. Four of these oral histories were videotaped and are used in our orientation video.

As a Site Supervisor, I continue to add to the primary source history of the site by recording and saving the stories and memories that are told to me by those who come searching for answers to their questions.

Sometimes the best way to understand a fossil is to go fishing. A number of our paleontological sites across North Dakota have fossil bones from the family Lepisosteidae (gar or garpike) preserved. While gar are still alive today, their range tends to be more southern and eastern, closer to warmer, slow-moving waters and bayous. While the living gar may not be an exact match to our fossil gar, studying the bones from the living animals can help us better understand what we’re finding in the rock.

Our paleontology department has a small comparative collection of recent animals - things that may share similarities to fossil creatures we find. For instance, a modern deer may have similar bone structures to 30 million- year-old deer. A modern crocodile may have ribs and vertebrae that look similar to crocodiles that once roamed North Dakota 60 million years ago. The same goes for the gar.

This is where taxidermy comes into play. Instead of stuffing the skins of animals, we only keep the bones (similar to a European mount). To remove the flesh from the bones, dermestid beetles work wonderfully, but tend to smell, and can have the occasional bug escape artist. We can’t risk that in a museum. Burying the bones in the ground and letting nature do all the work is also an option, but that takes a bit of time and also needs a location to bury the critter. So we stick to simmering the bones in a pot.

For mammal skulls, this is a piece of cake. All the bones of the skull are knit together by sutures – think a bone zipper – and tend to stay all locked in place. Fish skulls, including our lovely gar, have very smooth joints between the bones (called synarthroses) that in life do not move much. However once the skin and connective tissue begins to break down, the skull bones will fall apart.

Since the fossil bones we find are all disarticulated (no longer connected to one another), we need individual bones from modern fish – not a completely intact skull. What we had to do here was make sure the bones fell apart IN ORDER while cleaning them. We simmer them for a while, gently scrub, and then pull off a single bone. Repeat. The bones were placed in order off to the side to dry, where they will be ready to eventually photograph or draw for comparison.

Here we have an articulated skull with the dermopterotic bone highlighted in red. This lets us know where exactly in the skull the bone is.

Next, we have an illustrated dermopterotic, from our recent gar stew. This helps us identify a single bone, if we ever come across a similar looking piece in the field.

The State Archives has a large collection of film and video. The largest collections come from television stations, professional filmmakers, and state agencies. One other genre of moving images we collect is family home movies. Why would the archives be interested in an individual’s home movies? The answer is simple - because home movies often show us what life was like in the past in North Dakota. Events like birthday parties, weddings, and Christmas parties are part of our culture, and seeing these events on film can give us a perspective about how life in the past compares to life in the present. We are particularly interested in preserving North Dakota scenes such as farming, ranching, parades, athletic events, and natural disasters. Many of the scenes that will be featured in the new Inspiration Gallery: Yesterday and Today came from home movies donated to the State Archives. This gallery opens on November 2, 2014.

One film collection was recently donated to the archives by Eileen Mork, niece of Hatton native and famous pioneer aviator Carl Ben Eielson. The collection of 8mm film was shot by her father, Elmer Osking, between 1938 and 1955. Shooting film was a hobby of his, and there are some really nice scenes in the collection from the Hatton area. There is some aerial footage of the countryside prior to rural electrification. Wow! We are so used to seeing miles and miles of power lines and poles, it was really neat to see what it looked like before. This collection does have a lot of out-of-state family vacations, which we don’t necessarily want to collect, but having the North Dakota scenes is well worth taking the collection in and keeping it together.

Kodak film box with the description “Eastern Star Style Show 1950” from The Osking film collection

Formats of home movies have changed throughout the years and will continue to evolve. Home movie collections in the archives include 16mm, 8mm, VHS, 8mm tape, and DV CAM. We are able to convert all these to a digital format for preservation, copying, and easy editing.

Used in digitizing regular 8mm and super 8mm film

If you have home movies, please do not throw them away. If you have film shot in North Dakota that you are willing to donate, check with us at the State Archives to see whether it fits our needs. We can digitize the film and provide donors with a free copy. Most importantly, we will preserve the film so future generations can see the past.

Here are some of the other film and video collections at the state archives:
http://history.nd.gov/archives/tvnewsfilm.html
http://history.nd.gov/archives/othervideo.html

“What is your favorite part of the expansion?” As the manager of the archaeology collections, I know there is a right answer to this question. I should say, “Our new, state-of-the-art archaeology collections storage rooms!” (yes, rooms! The “s” is not a typo!). And I do love them, don’t get me wrong. They are large, bright, climate-controlled rooms with compact shelving units that have more than quadrupled our storage space. They allow us to organize our collections in ways that were not possible in our old space. In fact, we have an entire room filled only with artifacts from Plains Village sites – these are the sites that were built and occupied by North Dakota’s agricultural communities between the 12^th and 19^th centuries. Shouldn’t that be my favorite room? Yes! But it’s not. So what is wrong with me?

The problem is that I am obsessed with our new archaeology lab. Our old lab served many purposes, due mostly to a lack of space in our old office. It was a lab, but also included cubicles, a library, and miscellaneous storage. It was getting pretty crowded in there when we finally moved from this…

To this…

Here are some highlights…

The Dirty Room

As you may expect, archaeological work involves a lot of dirt. While most of it is left at the site, a lot of it does come in with the collection when it arrives to be processed. We try to keep the dirtiest jobs in this room, which has a large sink, a central vacuum, and some of our processing equipment. This is where we wash artifacts, do our size grading, and process flotation and soil samples (among other messy/dusty things).

The blue machine being used by Meagan (Collections Assistant) is a size grader. This contraption is actually an ingenious stack of nested screens that vibrates, shaking the artifacts into 5 different size groups (size-grading makes artifacts easier to sort, and is useful in many types of artifact analysis).

Lithic Comparative Collection

When you find a lithic (stone) tool at an archaeological site, the type of rock it is made from can tell you a lot about the people who used it and/or what was going on at the site. Because certain rocks form under unique geological conditions, we know they can only be found in particular places (called “source areas”).

Left - Comparing a flake with a piece of raw material (obsidian, which is a type of volcanic glass).
Right - One of our many drawers full of labeled lithic raw materials. This drawer contains cherts and quartzites from Wyoming and South Dakota.

Let’s say we find an arrowhead in North Dakota made of obsidian. We know that the closest source of obsidian is in Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park. That tells us that either someone in North Dakota traveled that far to get it, or it was traded into North Dakota by other groups. Lithic material gives us clues about prehistoric economics and trade, mobility, and tool technology. Our lithic collection has over 250 samples of rock from all over the country. We use it to identify lithic materials that may be unfamiliar to us, and to figure out where it originated.

Work Tables

We have an amazing team of volunteers who help us with different lab projects every week. We are currently sorting artifacts from trash pits at an ancestral Mandan village that was partially excavated in 2010 prior to a road project. We are sorting different types of materials (stone, bone, pottery, etc.) that will be analyzed by specialists for the final report. This is when the lab is the most fun (and on our breaks from doing and learning about archaeology, we tend to eat a lot of sweets and look at each other’s vacation pictures!)

Lab volunteers sorting artifacts from Larson Village.

Cataloging Station

This is where we catalog everything from tiny seed beads to projectile points to leather shoes. The work we are doing ensures that we are able to track every object that we care for. We come across a lot of objects that fill our brains with maddening questions about who, why, when, and where…

Top Left - Cataloging broken beads from a historic fort, Morton Co.
Top Middle - Glass beads recovered from excavations at Like-A-Fishhook Village, 1845-1880s.
Top Right - This photo shows the decorative detail of a cord-impressed pot. Prior to firing, a twisted cord of grass was pressed into the pot at different angles. The impressions indicate that the cord used was twisted tightly and the impressions are close together - these are clues that the pot was made some time after 1500.
Bottom Left - A child’s shoe from Fort Rice, Morton Co.
Bottom Middle - Historic glass bottles, one of which claims to be a remedy for the “dandruff germ” (once believed to cause baldness in men!). http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SN19010420.2.107
Bottom Right - A Folsom projectile point (10,800-10,200 B.P) from Lake Ilo, Dunn Co.

See what I mean? I suppose the lab is where I see objects come to life – it’s where artifacts to be curated become histories to be contemplated. It’s where I think the most about the people who made and used them. It’s where a lot of my questions arise, and it’s where I know I can find at least some of the answers. It is where I can see history being preserved, one artifact at a time.

So, the archaeology lab is my favorite. Final answer.